Sfdebris.net

Admiral X wrote:No, that you guys keep making shit up to make yourselves look better, but really you don't.

What exactly did we make up? Cite it. Quote it and refute it. Don't just say "You're lying" without addressing a solitary point.

*sigh*
You equate, morally, Communism with Nazism. I made a whole thread about why this isn't so.

The Antifa come to rallies with pepper spray and their hands. Nazis and right wing militias come with assault rifles, torches and oil to spray. Do you see the problem here?
I don't know why I bother engaging with you because I know you're going to dismiss everything I say, and everything that stands outside of your tidy, fence-sitting South Park centrism with " ", because you think your indifference makes you morally AND intellectually superior.

As far as you're concerned, anyone who cares about anything enough to raise their voice is an Extremist and therefor wrong. If there is an Alt Right, there must be an Alt Left. Matey, Politics is NOT the same as particle physics, and ideology is NOT a horseshoe.

So, I see a lot of people bring up the existence of dictators who were communist as though that fact means that communism is inherently evil. So, tell me people who I mostly have blocked so I won't see your reply anyway but play along, does that mean that the following list of dictators who were capitalists make you reject capitalism too? It won't, I'm being snarky as hell, but here's a list anyway.

Pinochet
Batista
Duvalier
Mugabe
Hirohito
Takugawa
Hu Jing Tao
Jiang Zemin
Deng Xiaoping
Musharraf
Zai Ul-Haq
King Fahd
Saddam Hussein
George Papadopoulos
Park Chung-hee

Boy, it's almost as if Communism, Socialism, and the various forms of Capitalism (from Laisez-faire(sp?) to Keynesian) are just ECONOMIC philosophies and have little to no bearing on someone's morality whatsoever.

Arkle wrote: So, tell me people who I mostly have blocked so I won't see your reply anyway but play along...

And they say comedy is dead.

Boy, it's almost as if Communism, Socialism, and the various forms of Capitalism (from Laisez-faire(sp?) to Keynesian) are just ECONOMIC philosophies and have little to no bearing on someone's morality whatsoever.

I'm not sure its entirely fair to judge governments in moral terms, mostly because I'm not at all convinced that morality is what people really want from their government. Jimmy Carter is, to all appearances, a profoundly moral man. He is also widely viewed as one of the least effective presidents in modern times. Most of the men the world celebrates as great leaders possessed deep moral failings. Their people often loved them regardless. It's not that I think that morality is counterproductive to leadership or anything...just that it seems largely independent.

Debates about which economic philosophy has managed to have more people die under its watch always struck me as the modern equivalent of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's not like we have a limited array of choices in that department. All modern economic systems are hybrids anyway, and we are forever tinkering with the margins, producing subtle but meaningful effects throughout.

But much to the dismay of economists and politicians everywhere, the two disciplines are forever tied at the hip. Dysfunction in one begets dysfunction in the other. There's a reason that White Nationalism is suddenly bursting back onto the scene after languishing for several decades, and it's not that we've been 'too tolerant.' It's not even gay marriage or the taking down of Confederate monuments. Those are just rallying cries; the real problem is that we're coming up on 20 years of economic stagnation. Yes, I know GDP continues to grow at a decent if slow pace, but that doesn't matter when literally ALL of the gains are being eaten by the very top. And for many in the lower 50%, things aren't just staying the same...they're quickly getting worse. People are getting screwed, and they know it, but the forces that are screwing them are so big, so remote, so...untouchable...that they either collapse in despair or fall into irrational anger. Either way, faith in the system erodes and support for extremists grows.

Whenever you have prolonged periods of economic distress, you get Communists and Nazis. We're a very right wing country, so the Nazis got here first, but if we don't fix the underlying problem, it's only a matter of time before the Communists show up too.

Few comments on your list:

Arkle wrote: Hirohito

Besides the arguments on whether Fascists are capitalists or not, there still is the argument on how much power Hirohito actually had.

Arkle wrote: Takugawa

Assuming you meant Tokugawa, this is fairly inaccurate given that he supported a Feudalist system, not a capitalist system.

Arkle wrote: Hu Jing Tao
Jiang Zemin
Deng Xiaoping

Chinese state capitalism is a mess, but I'll grant you this one.

Arkle wrote: Musharraf

Given that he left power in a whimper, not a bang, I don't know if he deserves to be lumped in with other dictators.

Arkle wrote: Zai Ul-Haq

Who is this?

Arkle wrote: Saddam Hussein

Saddam was a Ba'athist, which has more in common with communism than capitalism.

Arkle wrote:Pinochet
Batista
Duvalier
Mugabe
King Fahd
George Papadopoulos
Park Chung-hee

No problems here.

If anything, Arkle's list is too short. It leaves out the likes of Suharto, Mobutu Sese Seko, Carlos Castillo Armas, Ferdinand Marcos, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Fulgencio Batista, etc. etc.

TGLS wrote:Few comments on your list:

Arkle wrote: Hirohito

Besides the arguments on whether Fascists are capitalists or not, there still is the argument on how much power Hirohito actually had.

Good point.

I'm not talking about deaths from the system failing, I'm talking about actively killing people through purges and the like. Incidentally, this included purposely starving people to death in rebellious regions. This is something like 80 - 100 million people world-wide. This is communism's legacy.

Admiral X wrote:I'm not talking about deaths from the system failing, I'm talking about actively killing people through purges and the like. Incidentally, this included purposely starving people to death in rebellious regions. This is something like 80 - 100 million people world-wide. This is communism's legacy.

To get the number of deaths that high you absolutely have to include the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was an agricultural/industrial policy that was developed by Mao and really had no precedence in communist theory. There's nothing in the Communist Manifesto that says to kill all sparrows, nothing in Das Kapital about setting up backyard furnaces to make pig iron. It also wasn't malicious. Mao didn't intend to cause a famine, so it wasn't purposefully starving people. The famine was a failure of the state to provide food for all its citizens.

Since you are, unknowingly or not, attributing the deaths of the Great Leap Forward to communism, it is entirely fair and accurate to attribute similar instances of capitalist states not providing food for all their citizens. Not including things like purges and intentional killings by capitalist dictators and the lack of access to water and vaccines, the deaths by starvation alone under capitalism surpasses 100 million every 14 years.

LittleRaven wrote:So...the Alt-Right, then? Well, sure. They're idiots. We've kind of established that. But they're always been here, and they're not very representative of the country as a whole. No major retailer is going to balk at selling Wolfenstein, but they WILL balk at selling Confederate flags.

What the fuck is the alt right? Someone explain it to me already.